


something easy

by AtlantisRises



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Fantasy Racism, Found Family, Gen, Implied Sexual Content, People are Dicks, Sort Of, also language, molly just wanted to get laid
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-21
Updated: 2018-02-21
Packaged: 2019-03-22 02:28:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13754346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AtlantisRises/pseuds/AtlantisRises
Summary: The man sneers. “Her kind are nothin’ but bloodthirsty. You know that, right?” He looks at Molly like he expects an answer, like this is a reasonable thing to say.Molly stays absolutely still.Then: “Little demons, the lot of them.”And all of the warmth drops out of Molly’s gut. Then he’s leaning in and his hand is fisted tight in the front of the man's shirt****or: Molly's night is not going the way he planned it.





	something easy

The common room of the inn is livelier than any of the places they’ve been recently. It’s certainly an improvement on the depressing, soot-scented little pub they left behind in Alfield. 

Mollymauk is quite certain that he’s not the only one glad for the change. The others are clustered around a table near the fireplace, chattering excitedly—in Jester and Nott’s case—or relaxing with armor off and mugs of ale at hand. The population of this town is mostly human, and the ragtag group of them sticks out like a sore thumb, but so far nobody has been rude—or bold—enough to bother them.

Molly keeps an eye on them from across the room. He’s happy to see them happy and just as glad that they’ve decided to leave him alone for a bit. He’d waited until Jester was otherwise occupied with tale-telling—something about “teeeny tiny horns, like, the size of a  _ needle, _ ” that had Nott’s eyebrows creeping way up into her hairline and Caleb shaking his head—before slinking away from the table. Beau and Fjord had both watched him go, but Molly answered their unspoken questions with a shrug and a smile just dirty enough to make Fjord blush and Beau sneer, and neither of them made a move to stop him. 

So now here he is. He has one hip and one arm propped up against the bar on the far side of the room and his head tilted just so, and he’s looking up through his lashes at...at.

_ Gods dammit,  _ what was the name? Adel or Adam or...Adrian! That was it. Adrian.

Probably.

He’s looking up through his lashes at Adrian (probably), who is quite tall and quite muscular and quite human, and is currently running his eyes over Molly like he's a piece of meat. 

He is staring, in particular, at Molly’s horns, and at his collarbones, and at the flash of his fangs as he speaks, and just generally being less than subtle about whatever little tiefling fetish he has going on. It doesn’t help that he’d started their conversation with an oh-so-witty “now isn’t that an unusual color,” before Molly had steered them to safer topics. 

_ Fucking humans,  _ thinks Molly, but he only thinks it once, because honestly those arms and those big, heavy, human hands look like they could do a number on him and that sounds so,  _ so  _ lovely right now—nevermind how Jester would wrinkle up her nose if she were watching (she calls people like Adrian “horn chasers.” Molly adores her for it). 

Nevermind, because this is easy, and right now Molly needs easy.

His little crew has been in this nice little inn in this nice little town for two nice, cosy nights now, and Molly is getting bored. Getting bored means getting restless, and getting restless means doing that terrible thing where he goes poking into all of the hazy, clouded-up corners of his memory and rummages around until he stumbles on something that hurts. It’s pure compulsion, at this point. Nevermind that he  _ knows  _ he isn’t going to find anything except little snippets of bad, bad,  _ bad _ ; there’s something in him that coils tight and anxious when he’s left to his own devices, and he can’t help but turn inwards and try to root it out.

It’s always better to distract himself. Sometimes, fighting helps. Those odd powdered mushrooms they picked up in Trostenwald, gods,  _ those  _ helped—pity they’re gone already. Drinking helps too, but the hangover he woke up with this morning has put him off of liquor for at least a day or two. 

Something a little filthy and a little rough, that  _ really  _ helps; a good enough fuck can chase him out of his head for hours. So. Adrien. 

Adrien, whose hungry eyes follow the path of Molly’s tale as it curls around his wrist.  Molly laughs a fake little laugh. He can’t remember what they were talking about. “Thirsty?” he asks instead, and signals with one hand for a round of ale. Nevermind that he won’t drink his; when he lays his hand back on the bar he lets his fingers  _ just _ brush over the back of Adrian’s, and Adrian sidles a little closer and smirks. Or, not smirks. That sort of crooked, heated expression is a smirk when Molly does it; on Adrien it’s a leer.  _ Not subtle _ , but whatever. Easy. 

Molly let’s the attention and the knowledge of what’s to come warm him low in his gut and bites his lip and, yeah, he has this guy. Should he even bother waiting for the ale to come? He’s about to suggest they move things upstairs when someone tugs on the hem of his jacket.

He knows it’s Nott without having to look, because she’s the only one of their group both short enough and timid enough to get his attention that way, and he fights down a hiss of annoyance. Nott is...well, he’s not sure if she’s actually, technically a  _ child _ , in goblin terms, but she is very young and very flighty and the idea of upsetting her doesn’t sit well with him. 

He turns around slowly, instead, and bends halfway to her height. “Yes, Nott?” he asks.

“Ah!” says Nott, and then words fall out of her all in a rush: “I’m sorry for, um, for interrupting but Fjord said, he said to tell you we’re all headin’ upstairs, now, except actually Caleb an’ Beau already went to sleep, an’, um, an’ Jester said to tell you to  _ be safe _ , and then she sort of...made a gesture, and then Fjord told Jester to...to um...to.” 

She trails off and stares at something over his shoulder. Whatever it is, it makes her go stiff, makes her eyes go big, like Molly sometimes sees in battle and saw once in a courtroom in Trostenwald. She touches her face. 

Two things occur to Molly in short succession. The first is that Nott isn’t wearing her porcelain half-mask—it had gotten cracked in the gnoll mines outside of Alfield, and she hasn’t found a replacement yet. 

The second is that the bandages she’d wrapped around the lower half of her face have started to come loose and slide away, and there is quite a lot of green skin and sharp-toothed mouth visible beneath them. Nott has clearly noticed this too, and she’s staring over his shoulder, and she looks terrified.

Molly closes his eyes and curls his lip and takes a long moment to curse all of the so-called civilized races before he straightens up and turns around to deal with whatever look is on Adrien’s face.

Honestly, Molly wants to be surprised. He isn’t: Adrien is standing there open-mouthed, his face twisted up in pure, snarling disgust. His hand actually goes to his hip, and Molly hisses and steps in front Nott before he realizes that whatever weapon Adrien must usually carry isn’t there. Still: “Is that a fucking  _ goblin _ ?”

Molly forces the tense line of his shoulders to relax, forces his voice to go as calm and even and pleasant as possible when he says, “she’s a friend, and I’ll thank you kindly not to speak about her like that.”

“Yeah!” says a little voice, and Nott moves so that she’s beside him, still a step behind but holding her ground. Something warms in Molly.

Adrien sneers. “Y’oughtta ditch her,” he says. “Oughta kill ‘er, honestly.”

Nott hisses. Molly stiffens.

_ Easy. Easy.  _ Better to keep calm, better not to escalate, better...

“Her kind are nothin’ but bloodthirsty. You know that, right?” He looks at Molly like he expects an answer, like this is a reasonable thing to say. 

Molly stays absolutely still. Then:

“Little demons, the lot of them.”

And all of the warmth drops out of Molly’s gut. 

He feels his lips pull up, up, up around his fangs as if someone else is moving them. He’s smiling. He feels like a knife. Then he’s leaning in and his hand is fisted tight in the front of Adrien’s shirt and his tail is curled up behind his neck and his voice comes out low and steel-edged cold: 

“I’m sorry, did you forget who you were talking to?”

Adrien stills, the snarl falling off of his face. He says, “goblins, I mean. I din’ mean...I wasn’t talking about…”

“Tieflings?”

“No!”

“No, of course not. But goblins…?”

“I mean,” says Adrien, eyes wide, hand by his hip again, “I know they’re not actually...they’re not...but they’re  _ dangerous _ , nasty little things, all they do is kill an’ steal!”

“I do not!” cries Nott indignantly, and any other time Molly would fall over cackling at  _ that _ but right now his hands are shaking a little bit, itching for his swords.

“Explain this to me,” he says instead, his voice dropping lower until it’s almost a purr. He presses up close to Adrien, and tugs until they’re eye to eye. “What exactly makes a thing a demon or not a demon, in your head? It’s clearly not got anything to do with actual fiendish heritage, has it?”

Adrien flushes red and opens his mouth—what he thinks he’s going to say to salvage this, Molly doesn’t know—and Molly presses a hand over it, lavender over dull beige-pink.  _ Unusual color, huh? _

“Has it got anything, anything at all, to do with whether or not you want to fuck it?”

Adrien goes even redder, and he shoves Molly back and then punches him. Hard. In the face.

Adrien is still much, much bigger than him, and Molly goes reeling backwards, stars bursting behind his eyes. He has a dizzy moment to hope he doesn’t stumble over Nott before he falls against something hard and a hand comes up to steady him. 

“We got a problem here?” says a familiar voice, and Molly  _ feels  _ the rumble of it vibrating through his back. Fjord.

And Jester. She steps between him and Adrien with her nose scrunched up, and Nott steps up beside her with one hand on her short sword.

“Don’t you touch him, you nasty man!” she says. A little bit of warmth creeps back into Molly.

Adrien looks between the four of them and his hand goes to his hip again before he realizes (again) that he’s unarmed. He hisses something under his breath. Molly can just make out the word “ _ filthy, _ ” and apparently so can Fjord because he asks “excuse me?” deep and threatening enough to make Adrien’s eyes go as wide as Nott’s had earlier.

“I think,” says Jester, stepping closer to him, “that you should leave now.” And Adrien backs away slowly, and turns, and flees.

There’s a long silence, in which Molly straightens himself up and wipes gingerly at the blood under his nose. Then Fjord says, “well. What in the fuck was that?”

Everyone looks at Molly except Nott, who is twisting the hem of her cloak between her hands. Molly sighs. His nose hurts like a motherfucker. “That,” he says, “was a bad decision.”

“No joke. Your taste in men always this bad?”

Molly winces, and Jester presses up into his personal space to poke at his nose. He waits for the soft, cool hum of her magic to whisk the pain away before answering, and she butts into the silence he leaves.

“Didn’t we talk about this, Molly? I  _ know  _ we talked about this. People like  _ that,” — _ and her nose wrinkles up again, like he knew it would— “aren’t worth the time.  _ Or  _ the  _ alcohol _ .” She punctuates her words by prodding him imperiously in the chest. 

He lets himself lean into it and butt his head against her shoulder.  _ Dammit,  _ he was just looking for something easy. He was just restless and sick of being stuck in his head and looking for something easy. He was just...he was just…

Something tugs on the hem of his jacket. He looks down.

Nott’s forehead is creased, her shoulders are up by her ears, and she’s pulled the neck of her cloak over the bottom half of her face. The angry tightness in his chest loosens a little, and he bends down to her level.

“Mmm’sorry,” she says, voice muffled by the cloak. “Are you angry? I didn’t...I didn’t mean to ruin your night or get you punched or nothing, I’m really,  _ really _ sorry.”

Molly shakes his head, and gently tugs the cloak away from her face. “You didn’t ruin my night. That asshole ruined my night. I’m sorry for the things he said about you.” He kisses her on the forehead, stands up, and curls his lip. “Honestly, I should be thanking you. I bet he was a shit lay anyway.” 

Fjord snorts, and when Molly meets his eyes there’s approval in them. Jester comes around and slings an arm over each of their shoulders.

“You should not waste your time with stinky people like him,” she says sagely, as she begins to steer them all towards the stairs. Nott hustles along in front of them.

“Right,” says Molly, “You know, in retrospect, he did smell terrible.”

“In my experience,” says Jester, very seriously, “most humans do.”

Nott makes an indignant noise. Molly throws his head back and cackles.

**Author's Note:**

> To be entirely honest, I'm never sure how to feel about "fantasy racism" as a trope. On the one hand, real, actual racism actually exists and needs discussing within fantasy and scifi contexts. On the other hand, I hate the concept of goblins and orcs and others being "always evil" and all the racist European-kfantasy-bullshit it's based on.
> 
> For good or for ill, the idea of the disaster tieflings feeling particularly protective of Nott wouldn't leave my head, and then I wanted to write a fic about Molly and coping mechanisms, and this mess happened.
> 
> Also: obviously this contains some fan theory stuff about Molly and his memories/potential issues. Might be very not-canon soon enough.
> 
> Talk to me about it in the comments, or just say hi!


End file.
